Property owners and managers of businesses, such as manufacturing plants, commercial office buildings or health care facilities, constantly seek new ways to reduce energy consumption.
This should come as no surprise, as energy use accounts for 33% to 66% of a typical facility’s operating budget, depending on the building and the industry. This is especially true now because of the increased popularity of remote and hybrid work. In such a scenario, property owners can optimize a building’s operations to improve their bottom line.
Building operators can leverage energy efficiency to reduce utility costs for commercial properties. What might surprise you, however, is that one of the most effective new tools to manage energy costs – data analytics – remains for many an untapped opportunity.
Recent advancements in big data have allowed building managers to achieve improvements in facility and equipment efficiency. By collecting and effectively analyzing building operating and mechanical systems data, operators can reduce equipment and energy costs dramatically, while improving tenant/employee comfort.
Building operating managers today can also look beyond their building’s performance to find useful data for making decisions. Benchmarking through the Environmental Protection Agency’s no-cost ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager enables users to look at building performance data, including energy-use intensity, from every metered building by size and geography. This gives building operators apples-to-apples data comparisons with peer building systems.
Interestingly, collecting data is not the biggest challenge when managing building systems information. The ability to interpret the data and properly use it to make decisions can be difficult for operators.
For several years, building operators have been able to view performance data and manually spot trends and patterns in energy use. Building systems information can be viewed in several ways, including hourly, daily, monthly, seasonally and year to year. This requires analyzing large volumes of data and turning it into actionable information to target underlying problems and identify opportunities for energy savings.
While data can be useful in understanding building behavior, the information is often complex, especially for busy building managers with multiple responsibilities. These challenges are magnified when you consider many building managers are also trying to keep up with changing technologies as well as tenant/employee needs. Most dashboards collect and present data; however, they rarely provide insights.
Interpreting data should be a team effort
To get the most return on this technology investment, interpreting the data should be a team effort that includes outside experts. This is where many building operators fall short – not having the expertise or time onsite to leverage the data. That requires a special skill set. You can acquire it through training, or you can hire people with the right qualifications who have it.
At Rhode Island Energy, we often play the role of matchmaker for our larger commercial and industrial customers, helping them connect with consultants to better manage their data. For midsize customers, we have prequalified vendors that can help analyze building data and make system performance recommendations.
Whichever path you choose, it is critical to have the right skill set available to read the volumes of information and parse out the key stats that will enable strategic energy decisions. Without it, data can be underutilized, misused or overlooked.
We had a case recently where a LEED-certified building was using significantly more energy than it should. During a routine air balancing procedure, a contractor had disengaged an off-time setback but failed to reset it after completing the procedure.
The system change ran undetected for an extended period. This is a case of the system collecting data, but either no one was checking the data or those who saw it didn’t know what to look for. Plus, the customer had recently stopped storing historical data to save money. Consequently, the performance irregularities were not discovered until after valuable energy had been wasted and excessive costs had been incurred.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 40% of total U.S. energy consumption occurs in residential and commercial buildings – about 39 quadrillion BTUs. Just imagine how that could be improved if we maximized building system performance through improved analytics. This issue is prevalent in new buildings and older facilities, particularly when you consider only 1% to 2% of current building stock is new.
Data can optimize energy use
Whether from a comfort or energy-efficiency standpoint, data insights can help building owners:
- Improve overall energy efficiency and identify energy-saving opportunities.
- Break down data to better understand energy consumption based on building occupancy and time of use, thereby identifying peak demand-reduction opportunities.
- Monitor the environment in buildings to improve tenant/employee comfort, which enables potentially higher rents, and promotes tenant retention, employee productivity and health.
- Proactively identify conditions that might cause problems and correct them before they become severe.
- Do preventative maintenance and optimization – before issues arise or escalate. You could receive data about when an energy-related component is about to fail and needs to be fixed immediately to avoid emergency maintenance.
- Prioritize maintenance work based on criticality.
- Improve budgeting estimates of how many components are failing or are near the end of their life cycle while getting valuable data to help in planning and forecasting capital and maintenance costs.
Are you ready to connect with an energy expert who can help you interpret your building performance data? Rhode Island Energy is here to help. Schedule a no-cost on-site facility assessment today. We’ll identify custom energy-savings opportunities for your business, plus incentives from Rhode Island Energy and financing opportunities.
If you’re a large business, call 855-RIE-1108 or submit our online form and we’ll get the ball rolling.
If you’re a small business, please call 888-633-7947 or visit our website.